On April 4–5 Liam Young hosts “Data Drama” at Princeton University School of Architecture. Across 2 days 20 speakers will come together to discuss the spatial possibilities and consequences of big data and the network.

Tuesday, March 4, at 6:15pm in 612 Schermerhorn, join Mario Carpo, author of Architecture in the Age of Printing and The Alphabet and the Algorithm, for the second talk organized by the Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History this term: “The Second Digital Turn: The Style of Big Data”.

Now almost 20 years old, the digital turn in architecture has already gone through several stages and phases. Architectural Design (AD) has captured them all—from folding to cyberspace, nonlinearity and hypersurfaces, from versioning to scripting, emergence, information modelling and parametricism. . . . This anthology of AD’s most salient articles is chronologically and thematically arranged to provide a complete historical timeline of the recent rise to pre-eminence of computer-based design and production. . . .

Digital technologies have changed architecture—the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a “paradigm shift” for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti’s invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect’s design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds.

A generation ago, the post-modern quest for variation was a forceful plea against the dominant cultural technologies of the mechanical age. Today, digital technologies can deliver variations of all sorts and almost at no cost. Yet unlimited design variability inevitably challenges deeply ingrained assumptions of authorship. Contemporary digital culture and technologies favor and nurture a new notion of design indeterminacy, where objects are increasingly seen as systems able to self-organize and find the best solutions by themselves, when digitally empowered to do so.

Mario Carpo is a professor of architectural history and theory at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at Yale University SOA. Carpo’s research and publications focus on the relationship between architectural theory, cultural history, and the history of media and information technology. His Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001) has been translated into several languages. His most recent books are The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), Perspective, Projections and Design (2007), and an English translation and commentary of Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio Urbis Romae (2007).